01 Selected output

Maison Noir

Fragrance house — Editorial commerce

Scope: Four pages
Built in: One evening
Output: Native WordPress

A sculptural black glass perfume bottle carved out of darkness by a raking ember-orange rim light

The brief

A dark, editorial site for a fragrance house. Three pages. Launching Friday.

That was the whole brief. Everything below came out of the conversation that followed it.

The direction

The instinct with fragrance is to photograph the bottle and get out of the way. That is why every fragrance site looks the same. The direction here went the other way: treat the product as sculpture, light it like one object in an otherwise empty room, and let the negative space carry the price point.

Type does the rest. A single editorial serif at display size, set tight, with body copy small enough that the reader has to lean in. Restraint reads as expensive far more reliably than gold foil does.

Sculptural folded black paper planes lit by a raking ember orange light — Fig. 01 Every image on the site was generated against one lighting brief — single source, raking, ember. The consistency is the art direction, not the retouching.

What shipped

Product pages that behave like editorial spreads, not grids
A scent-note index built on native taxonomies
Checkout left entirely alone — WooCommerce defaults, restyled
Every image generated to a single lighting brief

Four: pages, art-directed and shipped
One: evening from brief to live
0kb: proprietary runtime to migrate off